Welcome to the afterlife of ordinary thigns
The machines are learning to remember for us, but they haven't yet learned to forget
You might say that the STSC is a bit of a niche concern, a cultish publication, an ‘If you know you know’ type of thing. And that’s true. But there’s layers. Within a collective filled with cult favourites there is one writer that is more cultish than most, and that is Felix Futzbucker .
As the founder of this group I have never met Felix face to face, never spoken to him in the Discord video channel. The name is clearly a pseudonym and the authors images he uses are made by Jeanne, a prominent figure in the STSC. It’s all very mysterious.
But I can tell you one thing though- he (or is it she?) can write. Our mysterious scribe dashed this one off in an hour or so and it is a corker.
The mystery deepens.
Enjoy,
TJB
Every morning, my phone suggests memories from exactly one year ago, every time I take it, every time I open Photos app. Today, like any other day, it showed me a photo of a coffee cup I once photographed and never shared with anyone. The cup sits empty on a worn wooden table I use to write my wisdom, early morning light casting long shadows across its surface, and then there’s steam, steam rising up. Beautiful picture; I took it for no reason I can remember, and now an algorithm has decided this moment deserves resurrection.
This is the strange afterlife our mundane moments now enjoy. Each casual photo, each idle thought posted online, each digital note jotted down mindlessly at some AM hour half-asleep, each fragment of our days gets preserved and recycled through automated systems that parse our lives for patterns we never intended to create. Mind you, compadre, very human quality, that, finding patterns. The coffee cups, pictures of instant noodles, nudes, receipts, et cetera returns as ghosts, summoned by software that mistakes purpuseless documentation for meaning.
My grandparents kept photo albums organized by year, each picture carefully selected and placed there with intention, only things that they think have meaning, or actually have meaning for them, only the things that worth remembering, even as an “external” memory.
(I wrote about my great grandfather here:)
The albums lived on a shelf in their living room, brought out for special occasions or quiet nostalghic afternoons.
But now our memories proliferate endlessly, spawning copies across devices and clouds, sorted and resurfaced by machines that can recognize faces but not significance.
The dating app on my phone recently suggested I might be compatible with someone because we both photographed the same mural on the same street corner, months apart. Sounds bizarre, yes, but the AI had noticed this overlap in our digital footprints and interpreted it as meaningful synchronicity. Much Jungian, that, pure digital metaphysics manifested. In a way, it created a connection that existed nowhere but in its own circuits - a relationship born purely from pattern recognition. Very human thing, that.
These systems shape our remembering in ways we haven't fully processed. They preserve everything indiscriminately, then serve our past back to us according to their own inscrutable logic. A photo of my junk food lunch from three years ago carries the same weight as my sister Felicia’s wedding. An AI might flag both as "important memories" based on some internal calculus of likes and comments and metadata or whatnot.
The philosopher Henri Bergson wrote about memory as a dynamic force that shapes our present experience, not just a static record of the past. It might be the truest commentary about memory and time, but our digital memories exist in a strange liminal space - neither truly past nor present, neither purely personal nor entirely public. They float in vast data centers, waiting to be recalled by algorithms that understand everything about their technical specifications and nothing about their human meaning.
Recently, my phone created an automated slideshow of "happy moments" from my camera roll. Set to upbeat music, it included a photo of my great grandfather funeral program. The AI recognized the smiling face on the cover but missed the black borders, the somber fonts, the weight of loss contained in that simple piece of paper. The moment was documented but not understood, archived but not felt, something that computers cannot (yet) do. I’m a techno-optimist, AI plays an important role in my life, crucial I would say, but the current, may I say “transitionary”, state of it is uncanny and peculiarly inhuman.
Sometimes I scroll through my cloud storage late at night - good exercise instead of doom-scrolling, try that - encountering years-old versions of myself, my friends, my family, my cat through random screenshots and forgotten photos. Text messages preserved from dead conversations. Drafts of emails never sent. Notes taken during meetings I can't remember attending. A calendar event saying “Pirate NFT” for May 2025 that I have no idea about - I don’t remember creating it. Each digital artifact carries a timestamp but exists outside of lived time, suspended in the eternal present of server farms.
And, see, it goes even beyond that, beyond just remembering what perhaps must not be remembering but creating time and memory that never existed at all. My girlfriend (I’m not some incel) recently showed me an AI-generated image of herself and me as teenagers, created by feeding our adult photos into an age-regression algorithm of sorts. And look: a photograph of a moment that never existed, yet somehow still felt like a memory. The neural network had reverse-engineered our features, extrapolating backwards through time to construct a plausible past, we looked like ourselves, but we met each other only in the late year of uni. It was lovely, I must admit, uncannily lovely, but what does it mean for us as a couple, for us a sentient species? What comes next? It is for exhilarating, awe-inspiring and terryfing, but in a comfrotable way.
So, to end this rant, I want to say this: these technologies are rewriting the grammar of memory and experience, they're creating new forms of nostalgia for moments we never actually lived, generating synthetic remembrances that feel real enough to trigger genuine emotion.
The boundaries between documentation and invention grow increasingly porous. Is it a good thing, a bad thing, porque no los dos?
My coffee cup photo will likely resurface again next year, served up by an algorithm that sees it as part of a pattern worth maintaining. Perhaps by then, AI will have generated variations on the image - the same cup in different lights, different seasons, different lives that never happened, my girlfriend with that cup (wait, that actually happened, I do have a girlfriend). The machines are learning to remember for us, but they haven't yet learned to forget. They preserve everything with perfect fidelity but no discrimination, no sense of what deserves to endure. They're creating a new kind of collective memory - vast, democratic, and fundamentally inhuman.
Yours in digital disdain,
Felix Futzbucker
I have( learned to forget). Took years!
Mark is going to call me back